Scheduling management systems for use in planning, scheduling and managing personnel are known in the prior art. Such systems typically include a basic scheduling capability to enable a business to forecast future needs and then allocates agent work hours according to the staffing requirements that have been forecast. Prior art vacation and holiday scheduling systems used with such scheduling management systems suffer from many disadvantages. Such systems rely on conventional time series forecasting techniques to generate forecasts for a large block or unit of time, e.g., a month. These techniques use fixed factors to decompose the monthly forecast into weekly, daily, and then hourly or smaller increments. This approach is computationally efficient but lends itself to accuracy only on a macro scale, e.g., month-to-month, as opposed to reflecting real changes in the business needs as they actually occur. Prior art systems thus do not have the flexibility to be responsive to changing conditions to forecast work loads and provide realistic scheduling of personnel to meet the dynamic requirements of the business.
Moreover, prior art systems are typically structured around a single business location, thus ignoring the needs of multi-site facilities. Another disadvantage associated with prior art approaches is with the inability of such systems to efficiently generate optimal work shifts for available agents when forecasting is complete. Further, these systems do not have the capability to efficiently generate schedules to satisfy agent preferences, availability and seniority. Thus, a need has arisen for a vacation scheduling system enabling the scheduling of agent vacations over a number of site locations and allowing all needs of a business to be efficiently met.